Gleanings From The Blogs

Shig Murao, Cafe Trieste, San Francisco, June 1988. Photo: Allen Ginsberg. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate

Poet Ron Silliman over on his blog has been running a contest and offering free copies of the Howl DVD to the first three that get the answer right. Too late now, the answers are in, but readers of The Allen Ginsberg Project shouldn’t have had much difficulty. Shig Murao, the answer, the “forgotten” hero of the Howl trial, we reported on, you may recall, in October of last year. Tuesday’s Silliman posting posed the question, today’s (Wednesday) provides the answer.

While we’re on recent postings and old postings, humorist Tyler Stoddart Smith’s amusing (and occasionally disturbing!) memoir, “The Karma Bum”, has just been re-posted (on The Morning News) and is worth a chuckle, if you hadn’t come across it the first time (it was initially published in an earlier version, in 2006, under the title “A Beat In The House”). Another in an apparent series! Allen-entertaining-the-kiddies!, (see recent posting regarding his poem/inscription for 7-year-old, Ingrid Law). Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, gives a quick digest of the Stoddard Smith piece here .

Another recent re-posting (and a slightly more adult recollection of an all-too-human A.G.) is Alice Ostriker’s “Elegy For Allen” (originally published in her 2005 collection, “No Heaven”) – “The greatest Jewish poet after Celan and Amichai”, she writes – We’re returning again to the Jewish Daily Forward (the elegy is the second of three poems by her) and its blog the archly-named Arty-Semite. Rodger Kamentz and his provocative poem/essay on Pound and Allen was recently featured in the very same spot.

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